This document explains how to contribute changes to the Gitea project. It assumes you have followed the installation instructions. Sensitive security-related issues should be reported to security@gitea.io.
For configuring IDE or code editor to develop Gitea see IDE and code editor configuration
Please search the issues on the issue tracker with a variety of keywords to ensure your bug is not already reported.
If unique, open an issue and answer the questions so we can understand and reproduce the problematic behavior.
To show us that the issue you are having is in Gitea itself, please write clear, concise instructions so we can reproduce the behavior (even if it seems obvious). The more detailed and specific you are, the faster we can fix the issue. Check out How to Report Bugs Effectively.
Please be kind, remember that Gitea comes at no cost to you, and you're getting free help.
The project welcomes submissions but please let everyone know what you're working on if you want to change or add something to the Gitea repositories.
Before starting to write something new for the Gitea project, please file an issue. Significant changes must go through the change proposal process before they can be accepted.
This process gives everyone a chance to validate the design, helps prevent duplication of effort, and ensures that the idea fits inside the goals for the project and tools. It also checks that the design is sound before code is written; the code review tool is not the place for high-level discussions.
Before sending code out for review, run all the tests for the
whole tree to make sure the changes don't break other usage
and keep the compatibility on upgrade. To make sure you are
running the test suite exactly like we do, you should install
the CLI for Drone CI, as
we are using the server for continous testing, following these
instructions. After
that you can simply call drone exec within your working directory and
it will try to run the test suite locally.
We keep a cached copy of dependencies within the vendor/ directory,
managing updates via govendor.
Pull requests should only include vendor/ updates if they are part of
the same change, be it a bugfix or a feature addition.
The vendor/ update needs to be justified as part of the PR description,
and must be verified by the reviewers and/or merger to always reference
an existing upstream commit.
We do all translation work inside Crowdin.
The only translation that is maintained in this git repository is
en_US.ini
and is synced regularily to Crowdin. Once a translation has reached
A SATISFACTORY PERCENTAGE it will be synced back into this repo and
included in the next released version.
Changes to Gitea must be reviewed before they are accepted, no matter who makes the change even if it is an owner or a maintainer. We use GitHub's pull request workflow to do that and we also use LGTM to ensure every PR is reviewed by at least 2 maintainers.
Please try to make your pull request easy to review for us. Please read the How to get faster PR reviews guide, it has lots of useful tips for any project you may want to contribute. Some of the key points:
- Make small pull requests. The smaller, the faster to review and the more likely it will be merged soon.
- Don't make changes unrelated to your PR. Maybe there are typos on some comments, maybe refactoring would be welcome on a function... but if that is not related to your PR, please make another PR for that.
- Split big pull requests into multiple small ones. An incremental change will be faster to review than a huge PR.
For imports you should use the following format (without the comments)
import (
// stdlib
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
// local packages
"code.gitea.io/gitea/models"
"code.gitea.io/sdk/gitea"
// external packages
"github.com/foo/bar"
"gopkg.io/baz.v1"
)The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the patch. Your signature certifies that you wrote the patch or otherwise have the right to pass it on as an open-source patch. The rules are pretty simple: If you can certify DCO, then you just add a line to every git commit message:
Signed-off-by: Joe Smith <joe.smith@email.com>
Please use your real name, we really dislike pseudonyms or anonymous
contributions. We are in the open-source world without secrets. If you
set your user.name and user.email git configs, you can sign your
commit automatically with git commit -s.
We adopted a release schedule to streamline the process of working on, finishing, and issuing releases. The overall goal is to make a minor release every two months, which breaks down into one month of general development followed by one month of testing and polishing known as the release freeze. All the feature pull requests should be merged in the first month of one release period and during the frozen period a corresponding release branch is open for fix backported from master. Release candidate are made along this period for user testing to obtain a final version that is maintained in this branch. A release is maintained by issuing patch releases to only correct critical problems such as crashes or security issues.
The current release cycle is aligned to start on December 25 to February 24, next is February 25 to April 24, and etc. On this cycle, we also maybe publish the previous release minor version. For example, the current release version is v1.1, but we maybe also publish v1.0.2. When we publish v1.2, then we will stop publish v1.0.3.
To make sure every PR is checked, we have team maintainers. Every PR MUST be reviewed by at least two maintainers (or owners) before it can get merged. A maintainer should be a contributor of Gitea (or Gogs) and contributed at least 4 accepted PRs. A contributor should apply as a maintainer in the Discord #develop channel. The owners or the team maintainers may invite the contributor. A maintainer should spend some time on code reviews. If a maintainer has no time to do that, they should apply to leave the maintainers team and we will give them the honor of being a member of the advisors team. Of course, if an advisor has time to code review, we will gladly welcome them back to the maintainers team. If a maintainer is inactive for more than 3 months and forgets to leave the maintainers team, the owners may move him or her from the maintainers team to the advisors team.
Since Gitea is a pure community organization without any company support, to keep the development healthy we will elect three owners every year. All contributors may vote to elect up to three candidates, one of which will be the main owner, and the other two the assistant owners. When the new owners have been elected, the old owners will give up ownership to the newly elected owners. If an owner is unable to do so, the other owners will assist in ceding ownership to the newly elected owners.
After the election, the new owners should proactively agree with our CONTRIBUTING requirements in the Discord #general channel. Below are the words to speak:
I'm honored to having been elected an owner of Gitea, I agree with
[CONTRIBUTING](CONTRIBUTING.md). I will spend part of my time on Gitea
and lead the development of Gitea.
To honor the past owners, here's the history of the owners and the time they served:
- 2016-11-04 ~ 2017-12-31
Gitea has the master branch as a tip branch and has version branches
such as release/v0.9. release/v0.9 is a release branch and we will
tag v0.9.0 for binary download. If v0.9.0 has bugs, we will accept
pull requests on the release/v0.9 branch and publish a v0.9.1 tag,
after bringing the bug fix also to the master branch.
Since the master branch is a tip version, if you wish to use Gitea
in production, please download the latest release tag version. All the
branches will be protected via GitHub, all the PRs to every branch must
be reviewed by two maintainers and must pass the automatic tests.
Code that you contribute should use the standard copyright header:
// Copyright 2017 The Gitea Authors. All rights reserved.
// Use of this source code is governed by a MIT-style
// license that can be found in the LICENSE file.
Files in the repository contain copyright from the year they are added to the year they are last changed. If the copyright author is changed, just paste the header below the old one.